We wrote from the prompt: Ask me… and got some strong responses with this.

From strength to strength, we went on to experience the power of Maya Angelou, by reading ‘Still I Rise’ and chatted about it.

We had a read of an item from the Scottish Recovery website, Write to Recovery, called: ‘Eat a frog’ about anxiety- eating the frog is one step in breaking through something you are worried about- and relates to the technique of thinking of a big problem as an elephant, How do you eat an elephant? In small chunks.

My suggestion for home writing was: What are your frogs or elephants?Only a suggestion, as we can write whatever we want and know it is right!

More mental wealth at The Hope Cafe next week! Anyone can write, please come along!

Tom Leonard’s poem, Unrelated Incidents III, or the Six o’clock news as it is known, is a door-opening script for us to own our language, our accent, our truth. It had a liberating effect when I read it aloud at a group and everyone wanted to read it aloud too!See here

Just started reading 'Germinal 'by Emile Zola, inspired by watching a film about artist Cezanne and Zola, who were friends. Germinal is about mining and poverty. It's written in what Zola called a Naturalistic style, it's very realistic! I skipped the long introduction, but expect to find out more about Zola's life and politics as I read on.Coming from Blantyre, a mining village in Lanarkshire, reading this has made me remember that my dad and two grandfathers were miners, also my step-Grandad, Wattie who helped to bring me up. I had a massive input from him ; he was a communist. The telling of this tale has made me actually go into the mine and scrunch myself into a ball, hunkering down under the walls to chip out some coal.It's fairly harrowing.So, from this,I wrote a poem today:

Buried beneath the earth,without a breath of fresh air,miners coal-tapping.

Fearing the world will fallon their heads suffocatingminers fighting for all.

Squatting; back-breaking work,no other choice for a living.Compressed; lung-black; stuck.

My father and grandfathers sat thereEnduring. Direst of dire.Nae wonder they were dour.

Their only fire, a lamp.no dry places, all were damp.

And, empty of all uplift,-but walking out of there,believing heaven waits.